The acme.com Google AdSense Debaucle

I have been watching the interaction of Jef Poskanzer of acme.com with AdSense with great interest over the last couple of days, because the way that Google AdSense deals with its publishers interests me a great deal both personally and professionally. On January 30, 2012, Jef posted this article on his site, detailing how AdSense suddenly deactivated his account and denied his appeals to be reinstated. That’s not necessarily the disturbing part, although it brings up the all-too-real fear that I believe all of us web publishers have that one day Google will frown on us and make the same decision on our accounts. However, I read today that his account was quickly reinstated when Matt Cutts got involved on Google+.

The question I have is this: is the process broken, since it considered his AdSense account to pose a risk of generating invalid activity or is it broken because it took Matt Cutts to fix the problem? To apply it to the real world, where the rest of us live, though, the bigger question is that if my AdSense account gets disabled, do I need to ask Matt Cutts for help or will he only help me if I have a Wikipedia page about me?

Seriously, though, this brings to light once again the importance of diversification in every area of life. Just like you wouldn’t put your entire 401K in Google stock (or would you… ?) should your advertiser relationship consist solely of Google AdSense products? Think about it and maybe you should start looking around for affiliate programs and other advertising partners to help reduce your dependence on AdSense on your properties. While AdSense may be the easiest to qualify for and to implement, you should make sure that it is not your only source of income. However, for those of us who just make a few cents a day, it’s not really as big of a concern… yet.